Some of us are still startled that Wallace Stevens was 44 when he published Harmonium. So what to make of the fact that Roald Dahl was past the midpoint of his forties when he wrote his first children’s book in 1961, James and the Giant Peach? At the time, he was known as a dark
Stephen Hawking is the most distinguished living physicist, who despite the catastrophe of motor neurone disease has been twice married, is a bestselling author and a media super-star. He is blessed with an extraordinary intellectual energy and fearless resilience. One might also add chutzpah. In The Grand Design he aims to give a concise and
The ghost story is a literary form that favours brevity. Its particular emotional effects — the delicious unease it creates, the shapeless menace and the unsettling uncertainty — work particularly well in concentration, as both Henry James and M. R. James knew so well. A ghost story does not need distractions. Susan Hill has already
Tom Frayn, says his son Michael in this admirable memoir, trod lightly upon the earth. He belonged to a class and a generation who didn’t think their story mattered. Even his profession — he was an asbestos salesman — has ceased to exist. At the request of his own children, who felt that they had
More than quarter of a century later, 1984 remains firmly fixed in the future, fiction having provided a more vivid view than our memories of the year which actually happened. Even so, a couple of things from the real, boring 1984 were memorable: Apple introduced the Macintosh personal computer (with a celebrated advertisement based on
Virginia Cowles was a 27-year-old American journalist working for the Hearst newspapers when she went to Spain for the first time. It was March 1937; the battle of Guadalajara had just brought a victory to the Republicans and besieged Madrid was an exciting place to be. Up till then, Cowles had reported mainly on events
Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’. Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago,
Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page. Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and
Stewart Lee is a name that should be more widely known. In the sprawling genre of live comedy, of which Britain still boasts the finest variety, Lee is a man who cuts deeper than most. Both admired by his peers and adored by his audiences, he is the antidote to those Saturday night TV comics
In this long and fascinating novel, Ora, an early- middle-aged Israeli woman, walks for days through Galilee to escape the ‘Notifiers’, the officers she fears will come to her door to inform her of the death of Ofer, her soldier son, at the hands of Palestinians. In this long and fascinating novel, Ora, an early-
He insisted that he was not a pornographer but an entertainer, and told the Daily Herald that the Folies Parisienne (sic) — one of his early shows, featuring the ‘Harlem Nudes’ and their ‘taunting, scantily clad Native Mating Dance’ — was intended for family audiences, and that children were taken along by their ‘doting elders’.
Gerard Woodward’s Nourishment opens in second world war London. Gerard Woodward’s Nourishment opens in second world war London. Tory Pace, a tired and drawn ‘mother-of-three and wife-to-one’, works alongside other patriotic but ‘grey’ women, packing gelatine for the war effort. One evening, she receives a letter from her POW husband, Donald, requesting a ‘really filthy’
In equal measure, this book is fascinating and irritating. The ‘Hi, guys!’ style grates throughout. From this, it is tempting to conclude that Tony Blair is incorrigibly insincere. But that is not the whole story. Although Blair is no friend to truth or self-knowledge, this is an involuntary study in self-revelation. The most revealing sentence
